


In a Lonely Place

by Mooniki



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Family Dynamics, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 12:37:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19426138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mooniki/pseuds/Mooniki
Summary: On the importance of blessings and apologies.





	In a Lonely Place

Remus saw autumn through the upstairs window, congealing on the lawn outside in melancholy piles of leaves, some blown up against the side of the shed and some lying here and there in little mounds to suggest human intervention of the noncommittal variety. It had been years since he last looked through this particular window – the last time he’d come up this way, he hadn’t ventured further than his father’s corpse drying on the veranda – keeping watch for owls maybe, or him.

But as for this window, he had been eighteen, resting his palms on the ledge and fighting a headache. The heat had mingled with loud American accents with half-empty trunks with Sirius in his doorway, holding a pair of trainers tied together by their laces.

“Found them,” he said.

Remus watched him through the window and when Sirius tossed the shoes into the trunk, he turned and said, “That’s it then.”

Sirius shrugged at his reflection in the wardrobe mirror and unglued a sweat-streaked strand from his forehead.

“A man wants to apologize to you,” Humphrey Bogart said from downstairs and the front door slammed, rattling the house. A few seconds later, the volume from the telly grew into a swell of gunshots.

“Loud lives those muggles keep,” Sirius observed.

“You’re one to talk.”

“Makes you think, doesn’t it? Different time, different place…”

Remus had a fleeting vision of Sirius in a trench coat and fedora reaching for a shadow then disappearing altogether into it. “The noise, I’m sorry –”

“Moony, it’s silent as death here.”

Remus didn’t question the insight. Sirius had crossed wands with clanking boxes and clankier adults before. He shut the lid of the trunk and did up its fraying straps, grazing the pad of his finger on a bent brass buckle.

Sirius had replaced him at the window, his eyes filling with summer. “The last time I was here your mum played those records. Things weren’t as hollow then, I suppose.” He paused. “Think they’re still around?”

“You’re welcome to look in the attic,” Remus offered and by the time he finished bandaging his finger by hand, Sirius had already gone.

He waited until the first chords of Edith Pilaf were loud enough to wrangle with the film downstairs before taking the stairs two at a time, catching here and there fragments of Sirius’s elementary French, and emerged from the trapdoor to Edith and Sirius both bellowing the climax of _La Vie en Rose_.

“ _Mon Cherie_ ,” Sirius said, beaming, standing on the other side of the attic, dressed in dust and holding an empty record jacket. A weathered gramophone sang at his feet.

“ _Mon Cherie_ ,” Remus volleyed back with a native fluency the other lacked. He let the trapdoor drop, kicking the moth-eaten rug back over it in a pile that looked flat in the dim, mottled light. The television was muffled in a heartbeat, replaced entirely by a feisty saxophone.

“I always hated French lessons,” Sirius said, crouching down to adjust the needle. “You ought to teach me. You’d be more fun than Monsieur Babineau.”

“Haven’t you had enough school for a lifetime?”

“Maybe, yeah,” Sirius smiled at him sheepishly. “But I haven’t had enough of you.”

Remus hid a smile. Sirius had been extremely sentimental all day, ecstatic to assist with the move and the first day of a voluntary cohabitation that suggested they were the two of them something more than friends of circumstance. He turned around casually and pulled his wand from his pocket, spelling the dust from old pictures of Hope his father had stashed to forget. The muggle photographs were faded and still. “Let’s just take them,” Remus said, struck with insight and a feeling of rightness. “The records. You know she would have wanted to give them away.”

“And your dad?”

“He’ll never notice.” The wound on Remus’s finger twinged. He waved his wand; the boxes holding Hope’s vinyl library flew up in the air and stacked themselves in a neat column by the rug. The newly vacated space where the birch stain hadn’t receded fully lay clean and exposed. Sirius eyed it shrewdly before launching himself into the gap, pulling Remus with him.

“You’re close” was all Remus could manage in his surprise before he felt Sirius’s hand on the small of his back.

The dark-haired boy grinned. “You have to be close to dance.”

“We’re dancing now?”

“Well, you’re not,” Sirius answered affectionately, “But all you’ve ever been able to do is sway like a drunk bowtruckle anyways.”

Remus would have retaliated with a witty riposte but the kiss Sirius deposited in his hair proposed a more desirable alternative. “He’ll be finished soon” Remus murmured between kisses, freeing the hair from behind Sirius’s ears and running his hand down the other’s nape.

They let the music play on anyways, the attic floor trembling beneath their feet.

Sirius pulled away first. “I wish she’d known then.”

“I wish _you’d_ known then,” Remus teased.

Sirius ignored the gibe. “Between my parents and your dad, your mum was probably the last chance we had at a blessing.”

“Pureblood superstition,” Remus refuted and instantly regretted his answer.

Sirius frowned like he did whenever a belief was blackened with his family’s blood. It would be another piece to chip at, to denounce, no matter how integral it was to his being. This piece, too, he wrenched, clawed at and tossed away, all in the space of a few anguished seconds. Then he shook his head and attempted a smile, tripping back into the shadows. “Forget I said anything.”

There was ancient magic though, Remus knew. Millennia ago when magic was new, and laws were inscribed in its use, encoding traditions long since forgotten about except in whispering manors where ancestral misdeeds were upheld as evidence of superiority. The same magic worked ceaselessly in the arranged marriages of Sirius’s cousins, and as the double-edged curse to Andromeda’s unblessed union.

“Forget about it,” Sirius repeated, voice firm. 

They moved the boxes down into Remus’s bedroom, shrinking each to fit in Remus’s battered trunk. Hardly ten minutes had passed before they heard footsteps pre-empting three sharp knocks at the door. “Your ride’s here,” a tired voice grunted through the crack. The footsteps faded back down the stairs.

Sirius raced to the window to whistle at James’s muscle car while Remus locked the trunk with his wand, more a measure against rodents than thieves.

“Aren’t you going to have one last look?” Sirius turned, surprised to find Remus waiting patiently outside the bedroom door.

Remus frowned. “Did you?”

“Sometimes I wish I had. Might have made leaving feel more permanent.” Sirius grimaced, then brightened. “But you’re not me, Moony. We’ll visit.”

Lyall turned off the television and stood as they thumped downstairs with the luggage but said nothing in the way of goodbye save an awkward pat on his son’s back, just as he had done seven years ago under the watchful hiss of a scarlet steam engine. Sirius left them to say parting words; framed by the piano window, the visual of his gleeful reunion with James and Peter was strangely loud in the room’s silence.

“Going to be making a living all on your own then,” Lyall remarked.

In moments like these, Remus could sense Lyall’s relief, his politics of pride that since Greyback’s attack had occupied his previous intolerances with new anxieties. Lycanthropy was a weakness where it made his son quiet and vulnerable but Lyall also stoked dissonant images of aggression, perhaps even bloodthirst. _Be more of a werewolf_ , Lyall seemed to think. _It would make you more of a man._

“Well, call if you need anything,” Lyall said then, as though he did not share the same reluctance to ask for help. As though he would be willing to provide it.

“Thank you,” Remus accepted the empty sentiment with sincerity.

They stood side by side, neither looking at the other until Sirius appeared again. “You better get out here, Moony. Those two are gagging to see you.” His face was bright and open again.

Remus made his decision as James and Peter hurtled towards him up the garden path. He dropped his bags into Peter’s outstretched arms and as if possessed by a soul far more courageous, turned back through the front door, back into the room with the string quartets and technicolour logos where his father was slouched on the sofa.

“I’m moving in with Sirius,” Remus announced, blocking the television from view. “All the rumours you’ve heard about me are true.”

Lyall was no longer an argumentative man. He gazed, hollow-eyed, upon his son’s resolute face in response. The television remote lay by his hand with its well-worn volume controls but neither moved to mute the cigarette commercial. 

“What is there to say?” Remus laughed out his father’s catchphrase, pretending he had never – not even for a hopeful second – expected Lyall’s blessing. He crossed the moulting carpet and wrapped his arms around the ageing man. The finger resting on the remote twitched. “Goodbye, Dad.”

As they drove away, Remus thought he could hear the volume from the television breaking through the walls.

_A man wants to apologize to you. A man wants to apologize to you. A man wants to apologize to you._

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a long time ago while doing a course in film studies. It's not how I usually write these characters. I was trying to write a personal essay the only way I knew how and also because, at the time, with everything that was going on in my life, I needed to see my emotions externalized [oversharing]. Now it's my turn to apologize about all the OOC.


End file.
